I met Melissa, this red-lipped, beautifully inked, raven-haired woman less than 6 months ago. One day, nearly two months ago she confessed her love to me for Banksy’s balloon girl. She said she was dying to recreate it in a photograph for someone special to her, but wanted a snowy-filled backdrop. She wanted that vibrant red heart balloon to pop off a clean white setting.

My husband and I recently participated in an Atlas Obscura event to get a peek inside the Wonder View Tower in Genoa, Colorado. I'd actually never heard of this place before a friend sent me a link for the AO tour event only days prior to the meet-up. Needless to say, I was hooked and immediately bought tickets.

Do you see it?The way the land piques beneath us, like your skin, my fingers hovering millimeters above it, anticipating my touch. Touch. The streets are scars and the rivers arteries feeding the body.

"Looking down these dreary passages, the dull repose and quiet that prevails, is awful. Occasionally, there is a drowsy sound from some lone weaver’s shuttle, or shoemaker’s last, but it is stifled by the thick walls and heavy dungeon-door, and only serves to make the general stillness more profound. Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house, a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world."

“Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Familes are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.” ―Diane Setterfield

Are all the heroes dead? Or just ours? Will the melodies ever sound the same, as somber and fixed in time as they are now? Will they stay? Because your voice, when you're playing Nutshell and humming Layne's voice on my parlor guitar, and I'm reminiscing over dreams I stopped having years ago; your voice and your fingers and everything else that I love. They stay in that way; reincarnated. I miss the dreams and am in love with the cause; a quandary, because I see things in dreams. Now I just feel like life stops when I sleep. Like death. In backness and nihility.

The trip was of course, wonderful, until the last 30 minutes of the drive home when Serenica's engine began stalling on us whenever we'd drop beneath a certain speed (hoping it's a minor fix!). Fortunately, after stalling out on several occasions and getting it restarted again, she died right inside our RV storage lot gate and wouldn't turn over.

I probably don't need to say here that I absolutely could not have predicted that it would have been 14 more months before we were ready to post the After shots, but I'm going to say it anyway: I had no idea how long this beast would actually take us to complete.

You hadn’t looked at me in days. You hadn’t really seen me in years. You saw only the heavy black clouds enclosing me. You didn’t understand me. You didn’t want to. You wanted something easier. You wanted to believe you deserved better. You wanted someone smiling back at you from future days. You wanted to stop cranking your neck backward in hopelessness and exhaustion.

And then a woman appeared on the barren land, with seeds in her teeth, and each limb a root in search of earth to plant themselves. And then a woman appeared on the barren land, and not from the rib of any man, and not for his pleasure or to come to his aid, for without woman, there is no life, and there is no man.

Recently. a good friend of mine confessed to me that she was swimming in negative and unproductive thoughts. As is true with all of us, these moments in time can come and go, but when they come, they can sometimes linger, creating an unforgiving and deceptive barrier between ourselves and the world, almost even distorting our perceptions of the world, and our place within it.

I saw you on the moon, dancing in between the rocks, floating in the light. You were something, some remnant from a story my great great grandmother had shared with her husband the night he said he loved her, the night they each realized how much they had to lose. So many beautiful and honest secrets dissembled as fable. I think it was celtic or norse or slavic.

Even on the sides of the steepest slopes and the tallest mountains, even on quests for air and warmth, and even with the sun so close our skin tingles and simmers, our bodies will expand and stretch and pine and settle, comfortably into the trees, comfortably into the grasses, comfortably.

Did you drink the whiskey? Did you call a truce with time? She won't stop searching because she loves you, because she can't imagine her soul disentangled from yours, space forever multiplying between you. Will there be music? There must be music. Could the universe be so cruel?

This all just stops. You know that, of course, but do you really truly know that?

I ache, perpetually, at the realization.

You are my container of happiness, my vessel, my iron safe. How could I ever handle more? I fear for the power of whatever could be loved more by me, even if it is our zenith, our culmination of desire and passion and wanting and patience. In truth, I don’t need more keeping me here, begging me to stay, and I would love such a creation so much it would gut me.

Do you ever have one of those moments, or events, that are so amazingly ridiculous that you just know it'll be something you never truly forget? Like, in the midst of it happening you can already appreciate its value, or memorability, in hindsight?

"This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

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I met Melissa, this red-lipped, beautifully inked, raven-haired woman less than 6 months ago. One day, nearly two months ago she confessed her love to me for Banksy’s balloon girl. She said she was dying to recreate it in a photograph for someone special to her, but wanted a snowy-filled backdrop. She wanted that vibrant red heart balloon to pop off a clean white setting.

My husband and I recently participated in an Atlas Obscura event to get a peek inside the Wonder View Tower in Genoa, Colorado. I'd actually never heard of this place before a friend sent me a link for the AO tour event only days prior to the meet-up. Needless to say, I was hooked and immediately bought tickets.

"Looking down these dreary passages, the dull repose and quiet that prevails, is awful. Occasionally, there is a drowsy sound from some lone weaver’s shuttle, or shoemaker’s last, but it is stifled by the thick walls and heavy dungeon-door, and only serves to make the general stillness more profound. Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house, a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world."

“Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Familes are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.” ―Diane Setterfield

The trip was of course, wonderful, until the last 30 minutes of the drive home when Serenica's engine began stalling on us whenever we'd drop beneath a certain speed (hoping it's a minor fix!). Fortunately, after stalling out on several occasions and getting it restarted again, she died right inside our RV storage lot gate and wouldn't turn over.

I probably don't need to say here that I absolutely could not have predicted that it would have been 14 more months before we were ready to post the After shots, but I'm going to say it anyway: I had no idea how long this beast would actually take us to complete.

And then a woman appeared on the barren land, with seeds in her teeth, and each limb a root in search of earth to plant themselves. And then a woman appeared on the barren land, and not from the rib of any man, and not for his pleasure or to come to his aid, for without woman, there is no life, and there is no man.